One of Colonel Lawrence’s hobbies is printing books by hand. There are few things that he likes more than an attractive book, and he has a valuable library of rare hand-printed volumes. On the edge of Epping Forest, some ten miles out from London, he built himself a little cottage with an interior resembling a chapel. Here he installed a hand-press, and when he finally finished his Arabian book he made six copies. A few were presented to friends, and one copy went to the British Museum Library to be locked up in a vault for forty years; that is, unless some one can prevail upon him to release it for publication. Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and several of Lawrence’s literary friends were among those to read it, and one of the most famous writers of the day declared that he considered it “a pyramid in English literature.”
Lawrence has great literary ability and a style of his own. He is as individualistic in his writing as in everything else that he does. A number of brilliant articles have come from his pen since he put aside the curved gold sword of a shereef of Mecca, and he has written an introduction to a new edition of “Arabia Deserta” which all agree forms a valuable addition to that classic. Nor could he receive higher literary praise than that, for all Orientalists concede that the foremost work ever published on Arabia is Charles Montagu Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia Deserta.” Lawrence says of it: “There is no sentiment, nothing merely picturesque, that most common failing of Oriental travel-books. Doughty’s completeness is devastating. It is a book which begins powerfully, written in a style which has apparently neither father nor son, so closely wrought, so tense, so just in its words and phrases, that it demands a hard reader.”
But Doughty’s book had been out of print for many years, and copies of it were extremely rare. “We call the book ‘Doughty’ pure and simple,” adds Lawrence, “for it is a classic, and the personality of Mr. Doughty hardly comes into question. Indeed, it is rather shocking to learn that he is a real and living person. The book has no date and can never grow old. It is the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs of the desert; and if it has not always been referred to, or enough read, that has been because it was excessively rare.”
So he set about to rectify this deficiency. He proposed that a new two-volume edition be published to sell for forty-five dollars, half what dealers had been asking for second-hand copies of the original. Doughty, an old man, had for years been devoting himself to poetry, and existing on a poet’s pittance. So Lawrence had at least three reasons for seeing a new edition published: to get the public better acquainted with a classic, to augment the income of his illustrious friend and predecessor, and to pay personal tribute to one to whom he felt deeply indebted.
In the preface Doughty says regarding Lawrence and the new edition: “A re-print has been called for; and is reproduced thus, at the suggestion chiefly of my distinguished friend, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, leader with Feysal, Meccan Prince, of the nomad tribesmen; whom they, as might none other at that time marching from Jidda, the port of Mecca, were able, (composing, as they went, the tribes’ long-standing blood feuds and old enmities), to unite with them in victorious arms, against the corrupt Turkish sovereignty in those parts: and who greatly thus serving his Country’s cause and her Allies, from the Eastward, amidst the Great War, has in that imperishable enterprise, traversed the same wide region of Desert Arabia.”
No sooner was the edition off the press than it was exhausted, and since then more editions have followed. So Lawrence’s ambition to do something for Doughty, and gain for his classic a still wider circulation, was more than realized. Unquestionably the sale of “Arabia Deserta” was stimulated by the fact that Lawrence had written a special introduction to it in which he paid glowing tribute to the great traveler whose experiences in the desert had done so much to pave the way for his own success. Lawrence’s introduction to this new edition also gives us a hint as to his own skill with the pen and as to what we may expect from his own volume on Arabia. He writes:
The realism of the book is complete. Doughty tries to tell the full and exact truth of all that he saw. If there is a bias it will be against the Arabs, for he liked them so much; he was so impressed by the strange attraction, isolation and independence of this people that he took pleasure in bringing out their virtues by a careful expression of their faults. “If one live any time with the Arab he will have all his life after a feeling of the desert.” He had experienced it himself, the test of nomadism, that most deeply biting of all social disciplines, and for our sakes he strained all the more to paint it in its true colours, as a life too hard, too empty, too denying for all but the strongest and most determined men. Nothing is more powerful and real than this record of all his daily accidents and obstacles, and the feelings that came to him on the way. His picture of the Semites, sitting to the eyes in a cloaca, but with their brows touching Heaven, sums up in full measure their strength and weakness, and the strange contradictions of their thought which quicken curiosity at our first meeting with them.
To try and solve their riddle many of us have gone far into their society, and seen the clear hardness of their belief, a limitation almost mathematical, which repels us by its unsympathetic form. Semites have no half-tones in their register of vision. They are a people of primary colours, especially of black and white, who see the world always in line. They are a certain people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They do not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our self-questionings. They know only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.
Semites are black and white not only in vision, but in their inner furnishing; black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts live easiest among extremes. They inhabit superlatives by choice. Sometimes the great inconsistents seem to possess them jointly. They exclude compromise, and pursue the logic of their ideas to its absurd ends, without seeing incongruity in their opposed conclusions. They oscillate with cool head and tranquil judgment from asymptote to asymptote, so imperturbably that they would seem hardly conscious of their giddy flight.